For Realsies: Donezo!!

Hihi!

OMG GUYS I'M DONE.  Graduate school is OVERRRRRRRRRRRRR.

I'm now two weeks into a post-internship epic-length vacation before I start a postdoctoral fellowship (translation: graduate school victory lap to wrap up requirements for licensure in my state) in October.

THAT'S RIGHT.  Like over a month from now!

Basically, in summation, things have worked out gloriously such that I a) have a new job lined up and locked down, but also b) get sufficient time off to recover from the last five years and be a worthwhile human by the time that job starts.

Also I can get married AND go on my honeymoon before I start my fellowship.

Guysssssss.  I'm so happy!!!

I can't tell you how grateful and relieved I am that things worked out this way and that I'm finally done.  The shock of it all, both the assault of the last five years and the bizarre fact that it was, in fact, finite, is still wearing off.  Gradually, that shock is being replaced by a sense of calm, wholeness, relief, and satisfaction.  I finally have my degree, as a result of five years of the hardest work I've ever done.  I have the thing, and it can't be taken away from me.

Part of the shock comes from the fact that I had gotten so focused on simply getting through internship that I hadn't stepped back to reflect on the fact that it wasn't just internship that would end this month, but graduate school in its entirety.

I didn't fully get this fact until I got home on my final day of internship, and Fiancé said, "You're done!"  I said, "I know, I thought this year would never end!"  Then he said, "No, you're done.  It's all done!" and finally, it actually dawned on me.

No more constant slog over hurdle after hurdle, jockeying for training positions that are underpaid and overworked.  Less and less of people who don't know me calling deciding how my life is going to look or where I'm going to live or what kind of work I'm going to do.  More functioning as the independent, capable professional that I've been becoming for years, and being recognized as such.

Finally, as I'm about to close my third decade of life, I have my life back.

Maybe that sounds overly dramatic and self-victimizing.  That's a self-criticism I've struggled with a lot.  On one hand, I've never forgotten that I chose this path for myself, and so in no small way I've been the one to blame when things have been hard.  I could have quit.  I could have put up more of a fight when I didn't like how things were going.  I could have chosen a different degree or an altogether different discipline.  I'm responsible for my choices.  I'm an adult, and this is what I chose.

But then, there's also no way I could have known how hard this would be at the outset.  The question of whether I would have gone to grad school if I had been properly informed of the hardships it would present doesn't feel wholly answerable yet.  The emotional, physical, and financial toll earning my PhD has taken on me is gargantuan.  It is also orders of magnitude greater than I anticipated.  So much of it was harder than it needed to be just because of unexpected turns of events or other people's decisions that I couldn't have hoped to influence--things over which I genuinely had no control and yet whose consequences I had to negotiate.

It's precisely these aspects of graduate school that at times made it particularly hard for me.  I'm ferociously independent, opinionated, and--although in a generally productive way--oppositional.  I am mistrustful of authority and therefore get really uncomfortable when people and institutions have pretty universal say-so over what happens to me.  I have a decent anxious streak, but that tends to manifest itself less as a desire to quietly, obediently, and inoffensively please others and more as a drive to meet my own generally ruthless and uncompromising expectations.  Unbeknownst to me before I enrolled, I am by these and probably other standards not an ideal graduate student, especially in clinical psychology.

Trouble is, I'm also prideful, particularly about many of the traits I just listed.  So meaningful efforts to bend to better accommodate the personality demands of my program were generally off the menu.  These things made my road a little tougher than it was already going to be.

But I guess the upshot of pride and stubbornness is that, now that I'm finally done, I feel at least a little gratified that I didn't completely lose all sense of myself--that I held onto these questionable virtues.  Recently a Radiohead lyric has been coming back and back to me: For a minute there, I lost myself.

As I find my ground again and have some room to breathe, I'm coming back into contact with aspects of my personality and life that got buried for a while.  Graduate school only really allowed for this little sliver of my identity to get expressed.  As my program progressed, the room for other parts of myself to have a voice got more and more compressed until it felt like they were squeezed into oblivion.

But they weren't.  They were just sleeping for a while.  I'm really sad I lost those things for a time--my love of photography, reading for fun, doing new things, laughing, talking about Buddhism and my favorite movie and the Socratic dialogue it's based on--but they're still here.  They always were.  It's not so easy to stamp out a whole human being.  I really should have remembered that anyway, but it's nice to have the reminder nonetheless.

For not the first time, I'm grateful to have this space, this blog, as an expectation that not all of me could get blotted out by the one little clinical psych part of my life.  I didn't always allocate much space to reflecting on and sharing the films I've seen, but I saw them.  They're there, just like all the other things that matter to me in addition to my vocation.  Maybe I'll be better about the sharing and reflecting as I move forward.

That's one thing I hope to stay in touch with for the next year and the years to follow: Now that graduate school is over, the responsibility for my life feeling good falls ever more to me.  That's a lot of responsibility, but perhaps not surprisingly, I'm really glad it's mine again.

{Heart}